In “Just Listen,” The Day’s music writers share their playlists of favorite recordings and invite you to share your comments and your playlists. Each blog includes a Spotify links for the music in play. You can stream the music, then add your comments in this blog.

 Few pursuits unite people across time and space quite like music. If I’m humming a tune from “Marriage of Figaro” in the shower, it’s pretty likely that at the same moment someone in Seoul or Johannesburg or Gdansk is humming the same tune. Music envelops us all.

But still, it comes as a happy surprise when the connections feel as direct as they did last Saturday.

I was driving back from the supermarket with the week’s rations in the car, listening to WMNR play some chamber music both inviting and unknown. Playing “name that tune,” I decided it was a sonata for viola and piano. The music was alternately seductively tuneful and straight-ahead 4/4 propulsive, with mid-century Modernist tinges, a bit of Prokofiev, a bit of Hindemith, even a bit of Schnittke and pop. But not really … it was warmer, openly inviting with a distinctly American feel to it. After the exciting finale, the announcer says it’s the Suite for Viola and Piano by Kenji Bunch.

Oh, Kenji Bunch, that Kenji Bunch, the Old Lyme guy, the composer who has performed his own music several times at Musical Masterworks, the musician that moved me in a review in 2008 to look forward to bigger things from “this probing and inventive talent.”

Well, here is a bigger thing, this viola suite.

It always feels like a gift from the sky to hear a new piece of music that sticks with you, but better still is knowing who gifted it. The two artistic directors bringing most of our classical performances to this area – Edward Arron at the Masterworks chamber music series and Toshi Shimada at the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra – are firmly committed to bringing new music by composers like Bunch to freshen our ears and enrich our sense of our own time and place.

Thanks for the introduction, Ed.

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So here is this fine sonata by 41-year-old Oregonian Kenji Bunch. The opening movement is lush and lovely, and the scherzo alternates between the rhythmic thrust-and-parry of the Soviet composers and a sunny central trio befitting the beaches of Rio. The Barber-esque Lament morphs into a viola cadenza (reminiscent of the great Shostakovich violin concerto) before the blizzard of sixteenth notes for a thrilling finale.

This is a piece that I suspect will stay on my playlist for a long time. I wonder if any of you recall Bunch’s performances here or if this duo works for you too.